Skit Happens
“Nothing is safe from a Skit Happens parody, when the nations up-and-coming comedians join forces for Network Ten’s first sketch comedy in 12 years. Starring Heath Franklin! Seriously”Dave
“Funny-man Dave O’Neil opens the doors to his crazy life in a half-hour narrative comedy. Expect laughter, tears and the appreciation of not being Dave.”Kinne Tonight
“Comedian Troy Kinne ditches the stress of modern life, bringing hard-working Australians a fast-paced half-hour of laughter.”Drunk History
“Rhys Darby and Stephen Curry pour themselves a drink in the international hit comedy format that takes Australia’s rich, and often surprising history and re-tells it through the words of our most loved comedians and entertainers.”Taboo
“Taboo has broken audience records in its country of origin, Belgium. The premise is as confronting as it is simple. The very funny Harley Breen spends five days and nights with members of a disadvantaged group in society and uses the experience to perform a stand-up routine about them – with the subjects sitting in the front row.”Trial By Kyle
“The toughest cases, biggest celebrities and genuine disputes can only be settled by one man, radio shock jock Kyle Sandilands. As Kyle carefully unravels each case, former The Bachelor Australia star and criminal lawyer Anna Heinrich is on hand to assist in forensically analysing the evidence.”Disgrace!
“The world is full of disgrace and outrage. Shunned politician Sam Dastyari and the team behind Gruen and The Chaser manage the latest outbreak of outrage in a half-hour of opinion, insight and laughs.”Bring Back… Saturday Night
“Rove McManus is on a mission to bring back Saturday night entertainment. A chance to reflect on what Saturday night means to Australia–then and now. Young performers will bring back the best of the past and performers of the past are challenged with reinvention. Sketches, guests, music and nothing but feel good moments as Rove finds the comedy and laughs by breaking down the conventions of entertainment and variety television. Join his quest to reunite Australia’s greatest acts, bands, and television faces in a generation bending live television show.”
Australian Tumbleweeds
Is it OK to swear in comedy?
Remember that story six months ago about that Tonightly sketch that upset the Minister for Communications Mitch Fifield, Cory Bernardi and various others, and inspired several complaints to ACMA and the ABC? Well, late last week, ACMA cleared the show:
Today ACMA has found no breach by the ABC, noting the comedic context rather than being used for attack…
…Key to the ACMA’s finding was the target audience’s likely familiarity with the comedic style of the program, and its broadcast at 9pm with an MA15+ classification which allows for coarse language.
This was the sketch in question…
…or, if you can’t be bothered to watch it, here’s how TV Tonight summarised it…
The ABC is under fire from the Minister for Communications Mitch Fifield after Tonightly with Tom Ballard showed a poster of an Australian Conservatives candidate with the wording “is a c**t.”
The joke from comedian Greg Larsen suggested the electorate of Batman be renamed “Batman is a c**t” due to founder John Batman’s links to the murder of Aboriginal people.
“We cannot shy away from the terrible things he did,” Larsen suggested.
Elaborating on his idea, to feigned objections from Ballard, Larsen showed mock posters of Greens candidate Alex Bhathal & Labor candidate Ged Kearney with the words “Batman is a c**t.”
But for Australian Conservatives candidate Kevin Bailey he noted, “This was an issue because there is no Batman anywhere on that poster, so I’ve had to put ‘Kevin Bailey was a c**t’,” Larsen said.
“Greg that is unacceptable; regardless of what you think of his politics that is completely beyond the ball!” Ballard replied.
Mitch Fifield said in a statement, “Candidates for elected office expect to be criticised and parodied. But this ABC segment clearly crossed a line, particularly given that it was directed towards an individual who has served his nation in uniform.
“Vitriolic abuse of this kind has no place on the national broadcaster and I will be asking the ABC to investigate. The ABC should also immediately offer an unreserved apology to Mr Bailey.”
Australian Conservatives leader Cory Bernardi has also reportedly written to ABC managing director Michelle Guthrie to complain.
…so, now that you’ve either watched the video or read the above summary, or both, do you think Tonightly crossed the line? Because we don’t. In fact, it was obvious at the time that it hadn’t, and that this was a beat-up by a bunch of right-wingers deliberately misunderstanding the sketch and piling-on it as a way to attack the ABC.
The joke wasn’t calling Australian Conservatives candidate Kevin Bailey a cunt, it was about calling John Batman a cunt. Context in comedy is extremely important and its good to see ACMA make a context-based ruling in this instance, even if, as ACMA pointed out in their ruling “the limits [of the context] were certainly tested by the program”.
Of course, whether the sketch was funny and a good piece of satire is another matter. Arguably, if you have to resort to calling someone a cunt – whether they’re a historical figure or a current aspiring politician – you’ve lost the argument. In this podcast (which is well worth your time) Shaun Micallef argues that swearing is something you should minimise in comedy, for a few very good reasons:
I’m protective of the power of those particular words…you want to keep your powder dry with those ones because they’re helpful words, beautiful words in the English language that still have enormous power, so you want to save them…my general rule is that if you can do without it then you do…if the end line of a joke is a swear word, and you take it out and there’s nothing there, then it’s probably not a very good joke.
Although it’s probably also true to say that this particular Tonightly sketch would have been less hard-hitting had it gone with a softer take like “Batman was a bastard” or a slightly more accurate term like “Batman was a genocidaire”.
… partly because almost no one’s heard of the term “genocidaire”.
True Dinks take 2
The not-so-surprise comedy success story of 2017, True Story with Hamish and Andy is back and operating on an equally unsurprising principle: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
So the set-up remains exactly the same: Hamish & Andy sit on a couch, a regular unknown person sits down across from them and proceeds to tell a classic story from their life that will – hopefully – entertain and amuse. It’s Drunk History without the booze or the learning, but with a fairly polished story that usually provides some laughs.
“It was a long time ago, and I was very young” is a great way to distance yourself from your bad behaviour. And so it proves to be in episode one, as a tale of trying to get out of poetry homework (having to come up with 24 poems is pretty steep, admittedly) in 1986 rapidly escalates thanks to one slack student’s refusal to admit her sickie is fake. Do we end up in a hospital heading for surgery? It’d be a short episode if we didn’t.
While all the old favourites are back, and by that we mean decent comedy performers in cameo roles – hey look, Rob Sitch as a rhyming poetry teacher! Mark Mitchell hamming it up as a doctor! Stephen Curry as a surgeon! – there’s a new twist or two as well. Having the re-creation change as the story-teller provides more or new information is an obvious way to get laughs and starting out the first episode with an example (our lead in the flashback changes as we’re told more about her look) suggests things might be a bit more flexible reality-wise this season.
(okay, we saw Hamish & Andy on breakfast television and they said there’s an episode coming up where the storyteller is a bit of a bullshitter and they constantly had to rein him in)
But otherwise this remains the kind of solid, unremarkable amusement that Australian television really needs to consider as the floor for broadcast quality rather than a high water mark. Hamish & Andy can get stories out of the public in their sleep after over a decade in radio, the stories themselves are good but rarely great (hey, at least they don’t have to pay writers for the ideas) and while the all-star casts are great the actors rarely get to do much more than turn up and get a recognition laugh or two.
The core problem is that this is a show that says that while craft and care should be lavished on every other aspect of the production – the production values are always first-class (just look at the range of locations!) – comedy itself can’t be crafted: you just ask random people for funny stories and use the best. And again, while these stories are good, we’re not talking about a halfway decent episode of The Games or Frontline here; given a fortnight pretty much anyone reading this could come up with a much funnier “real-life” story*, but that would defeat the purpose of the show. Which, following that line of logic, clearly isn’t to be funny.
Put another way, television comedy lives or dies in the writing, and this show doesn’t really want to use writers at all.
*anyone who says “you couldn’t make this stuff up!” deserves a slap. It’s the story of a teen girl who refused to admit her illness was faked, not Fawlty Towers.
Ow, that (Street) Smarts
Australian comedy isn’t exactly known for exceeding expectations. But with Street Smart – the new sitcom from the makers of Here Come the Habibs, with a fair spray of Fat Pizza and Housos DNA in there – it’s not like they could really do worse. These are shows where even the fans are laughing at them at least as much as with them, and even those laughs are becoming harder to find.
So here’s the good news: this time around, Tahir Bilgic and his crime crew are focusing on what they do best – not telling jokes. Or at least, not making a show that’s built entirely around telling jokes, and we can all be somewhat grateful for that.
The set-up of Street Smart is that four idiots want to commit crimes. But where most Australian sitcoms would then dig down into a bunch of barely amusing character stuff about each of them, recycling the same situations over and over again each week, Street Smart tries something different: the focus is on the caper.
Upon discovering that the local cop shop has a room full of confiscated items, the gang come up with a scheme to get inside, and… look, the whole thing ends with them stripping, then getting robbed in their underwear so don’t get your hopes up. And yes – *heavy sigh* – there is also a bunch of character stuff as well and it’s about as funny as you’d expect: men are stupid, women are pushy and also stupid. At least everyone’s a cartoon so no-one can get too offended.
But by putting at least some of the focus on their criminal scheme, there’s an element of “how’s this going to play out?” that makes this just that little bit more interesting to watch than you might think. It’s been a while since Australia made a sitcom with this much story; usually we’re happy with an ironic ending that makes it feel like everything we just saw was somehow linked. And while it’s not a great story, it does feature a string of events that flow semi-logically one after another to end with a character trapped in a prison cell talking to the toilet.
Look, let’s not get too excited here: almost all of these jokes are bad, the plotting isn’t exactly Ocean’s 11 level and the one big twist was just recently done in the now-showing New Zealand comedy movie The Breaker Upperers (which is well worth your time). But the combination of a halfway decent story and a whole lot of jokes – some of which do work: the fake cop outfits were funny, and “Trans Phats” is a halfway decent pun – means this is slightly less painful to watch than 80% of Here Comes the Habibs.
Then again, it seems Ten have decided that “Crappy Shows Don’t Work Anymore“, so this probably won’t be back next week.
All Aussie Adventures: Hittin’ the road again
The return of All Aussie Adventures last night comes at a time in TV history when broadcasters seem to be increasingly looking to the popular favourites of the past to draw in an audience (Roseanne, that proposed re-boot of Hypotheticals, that proposed re-boot of Frasier). Which is all well and good if it’s entertaining and funny, but maybe less so if you have no idea of the context of the show.
The first series of All Aussie Adventures, starring Glenn Robbins as Russell Coight, was broadcast so long ago that it pre-dates 9/11 (by two days). Even then, it was parodying a genre of television which had largely faded from our screens – The Leyland Brothers, Malcolm Douglas, Steve Irwin, and Les Hiddens in The Bush Tucker Man – in which one or more wizened blokes did it rough in the outback, drawing on the knowledge of the first Australians and their own wits to survive.
Anyone under 35 probably remembers Steve Irwin but most likely not Malcolm Douglas, Les Hiddens, or Mike and Mal Leyland. Not for them a childhood of watching in awe as Les discovers food and water in a seemingly barren landscape, or the Leylands find themselves stranded in the desert with little in the way of supplies and no way of getting help.
But this probably doesn’t matter when it comes to All Aussie Adventures. The main gag is that Coight, for all his soliloquies to camera about good bushcraft, actually has very little knowledge of outback survival at all – which makes watching him stuff it up all the more hilarious.
Most people love a good “hit in the nuts” gag, and there are at least three good ones in the first episode of All Aussie Adventures. There are also plenty of other gags of a similar nature, in which Coight falls, stumbles or generally makes life worse for himself and anyone who happens to be passing.
Working Dog, the makers of this show (and also of Have You Been Paying Attention?), are well-known for their high gag rate, and All Aussie Adventures doesn’t disappoint. Even if you think you know where the gag is going – and the set-up isn’t always subtle – it’s always either brilliantly performed by Robbins or goes somewhere slightly different to your expectations, so almost all of the gags land perfectly. Not something you can say of the show which followed it, Street Smart. But more on that some other time…
The Notorious B.R… iggs.
It’s been a while since we checked in on The Weekly, which probably makes us a regular cast member because hey look, Briggs is back! For only the second time this year. Remember when they announced he was going to be a regular cast member and then he promptly vanished from the line-up? Good times.
Good to see the warm, hilarious banter between Briggs and Charlie “I have a black friend, honest” Pickering is still there though: “The last time you were here you went for a ride with Bill Shorten on a bicycle built for… I want to say one-and-a-half”. No Charlie, what you want to say is the last time Briggs was here was back in episode one and we’re now up to episode 14: he’s appeared on the show less times than the Channel Nine logo in the corner of all that footage you’re constantly lifting from the commercial networks, and yet he’s still in the opening credits each week. Why?
Then again, maybe it’s just that nobody wants to sit near Pickering: Kitty Flanagan was nowhere to be seen this episode either – and it wasn’t like they didn’t have room, as Mel Buttle was on basically doing Kitty’s segment – while the only other regular cast member Tom Gleeson… well, of course he was there front and center:
That’s the face of a man just happy to be anywhere.
Otherwise… well, what else is there to say about a show that even the ABC’s own iView page doesn’t know whether to list under news, comedy, or a complete waste of time? It’s still 25% news clips from other shows, a forgettable interview segment, a forgettable interview segment hosted by Charlie Pickering, an OTT comedy rant delivered by Flanagan 80% of the time and a general sense of being made by people with one eye on the clock. It is what it is.
This idea of having Briggs do the “hard hitting” political interviews (this episode: Adam Bandt) is a bit strange though. It’s not like Pickering couldn’t do them and it’s not like Briggs is a great interviewer – or even a regular on the show – so why bring him in just for them? If they can only get him on as an occasional guest but they want to make his appearances seem special, why get him to do the one thing everyone else on the show is already doing every week?
Having Briggs do the political interviews on a show where the two main regulars are already doing interviews really just underlines how shithouse the two main regulars are. They’re both interviewers on what is just a soft news program, but you can’t get Gleeson to interview politicians because he’s a sarcastic shit, and you can’t get Pickering to interview politicians because… why again?
The only reason we can think of that makes sense from the show’s point of view – he’s the host; even just for promotional reasons you’d want him to be the one doing the high profile, big-deal chats – is that they don’t want Pickering sucking up to politicians so he can remain unbiased when it comes time for him to do his trademark hard-hitting political commentary and close-to-the-edge satire.
And if that’s the case, it’s funnier than anything The Weekly has put to air in a very long time.
True Dinks
Press release time!
True Story with Hamish & Andy, the breakout smash hit from 2017, returns for its eagerly awaited second series on Tuesday, August 7, at 8.40pm on Nine and 9Now.
This original format brings to life the best Australian tales you’ve never heard, told by the very people who experienced them and then humorously and cinematically realised through dramatic recreations.
In each half-hour episode, Hamish and Andy meet one regular Australian storyteller who recounts their amazing, surprising, funny and above all true story, which is simultaneously recreated by a cast of Australia’s most renowned performers.
The carefully scripted recreations produce a dramatic and heightened reality that brings a sense of the epic to these everyday stories of glory … or perhaps more often than not, complete humiliation.
The first series was a ratings smash hit, acclaimed by critics and viewers alike. Each episode attracted an average audience of almost two million viewers (including encore screenings and streaming on 9Now), making True Story with Hamish & Andy one of the most successful new program launches in recent years.
An all-star lineup of actors has been assembled for series two including Essie Davis, John Waters, Dan Wyllie, Bruce Spence, Rob Carlton, Rob Sitch, Mark Mitchell, Jane Allsop, Stephen Hall, Dave Lawson, Anne Edmonds, Katrina Milosevic, Georgia Love, Sam Pang, Susie Youssef, Debra Lawrance, Richard Davies, Brian Mannix, Shareena Clanton, Kate Jenkinson, Jessica Tovey, Ian Meadows, Denise Scott, Michala Banas, Toby Truslove, Santo Cilauro, Nicholas Bell, Dilruk Jayasinha, Kate McCartney, Luke McGregor, Mandy McElhinney, Dave Hughes, Christie Whelan-Browne and Genevieve Morris.
In Episode One we meet Carol. Despite Carol’s visual impairment, her mum has always told her that she can do anything. In 1986, when Carol was 15, she was given an English assignment that required her to write out and analyse 40 poems. But the night before the due date, she hadn’t even started. And with reading not her strong suit, Carol decided that her only way out was to fake an illness and miss the next day of school. What we learn in this amazing True Story is that once Carol is committed to something, there is no going back – even if what she has committed to is entirely fictitious. Will the highly trained medical fraternity catch Carol out, or will the wily teenager fool them all, just to get out of an English assignment?
True Story with Hamish & Andy, made with the assistance of Film Victoria, is created and produced by Tim Bartley, Hamish Blake, Andy Lee and Ryan Shelton, and written by Hamish Blake, Andy Lee and Ryan Shelton.
Guess we all knew this was coming, but it doesn’t hurt to having it down in writing. Especially as they don’t seem to be flogging it quite as hard second time around; sure, we’ve seen some ads, but compared to the return of Russell Coight’s All Aussie Adventures – which you’d have to be in the grave to no know is back this Sunday evening – it’s definitely flying in under the radar.
So here’s to our favourite not-quite Drunk History series: the cast may not be quite as high-powered as the first season, but presumably this time around they have a been idea of what works so the stories themselves will get the job done. And if no, they can always bring back the crime kid from season one: presumably his scams only got more advanced once he made it to high school.
Should Barry Humphries shut up and retire?
Barry Humphries has been in the news a lot recently, because of outrage at some comments he made about trans people in an interview with Lloyd Evans for right-wing UK-based magazine The Spectator:
I ask if his biggest crowd-pleaser, Dame Edna Everage, has attracted the attention of trans activists, who are swift to take offence at anything they perceive as transphobic. I take him through their case in detail. They say that more than 40 per cent of trans men and women have attempted or considered suicide and from this they argue that because transphobia is capable of catalysing an act of self-harm it ought to be treated in law as a form of assault. ‘Terrible rat-baggery,’ he says. He calls transgenderism ‘a fashion — how many different kinds of lavatory can you have? And it’s pretty evil when it’s preached to children by crazy teachers’. He recalls provoking a torrent of outrage when he used the word ‘mutilation’ to describe gender-reassignment surgery. ‘They had their genitalia chopped off and tucked in and whatever they had to do. And that aroused a lot of indignation — probably among the people who’d spent a lot of money having it done. But I don’t think I’m right to pontificate. I’m really an actor.’ He proceeds to analyse the psychological frailties of his profession. ‘We’re an uncomfortable mixture of vanity and insecurity. Those two don’t fit comfortably together. But then,’ he says, switching tack, ‘we’re a pretty nice and generous lot too.’
Humphries also had some things to say about Donald Trump in the same interview, which stirred things up further:
I ask about his favourite character, the sybaritic diplomat Sir Les Patterson, whose boorish and sexist conduct carries a powerful echo of Donald Trump. Has the President stolen your act? ‘No, I don’t think so,’ he says. ‘I’m grateful to Trump for stirring up politics. And I won’t be joining any marches against him.’ His hope is to create a new show consisting entirely of Sir Les. ‘He has very fresh visions for England and he’s wonderful to perform because you can say whatever you like.’ Does he see an opportunity in the new climate of puritanism? ‘Yes! An opportunity to cause maximum offence.’
Barry Humphries expressing right-wing views of this type – and left-leaning people being surprised and annoyed about them – isn’t exactly a new thing, and goes back to at least the early 1980’s according to this article on The Australian website:
Writing in The National Times on October 3, 1982, Craig McGregor, for instance, accused Humphries of “racism and sexism and crypto-fascism”. “Humphries’s own personal politics, I assume, is somewhere to the right of Ronald Reagan,” McGregor wrote, citing Humphries’s place on the board of Quadrant magazine as evidence. “Humphries’s is a profoundly reactionary art,” he continued. “It reminds one of nothing so much as the grotesque and despairing cabaret which flourished in Berlin as the Nazis began their terrible climb to power.”
(Somewhat ironic given that the Spectator interview was given to promote the show Barry Humphries’ Weimer Cabaret, which finished up last night at the Barbican in London.)
Where Humphries’ actual politics lies, though, isn’t easy to establish. We summarised it in our review of Anne Pender’s 2011 biography of Humphries, One Man Band:
Less discussed, but just as relevant to an understanding of Humphries and his work, is that he hated the conservative establishment his parents wanted him to be a part of. This led him to rebel at school, university and throughout his life, sometimes on political matters (in 1960 he joined a number of ex-patriot Australians on one of the famous marches from Aldermaston to London organised by the Campaign For Nuclear Disarmament [CND]), but more often by creating provocative comedy about situations which appalled him.
Few Australian commentators seemed to realise that when Humphries made it big in TV in the UK with shows like An Audience with Dame Edna and the series The Dame Edna Experience, a large part of his act was mocking Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The insults Edna handed out to celebrities with the punchline “I mean that in a caring way, I do” were a reference to Thatcher’s claim that she cared about the unemployed whilst all the time her government was slashing the public services which could have helped them. This parody of Thatcher built on the character that Humphries had spent several decades establishing, a character who brilliantly mocked small-minded Australian wowsers, and then became bloated with her own self-importance upon achieving a certain level of success.
And:
Pender argues in her book that Humphries is an anarchist at heart, someone who targets his comedic rage at anyone who deserves it; Humphries, meanwhile, prefers to describe himself as “apolitical”. But for Anne Pender it is Patrick White’s description of Humphries as “a genuine fantastic, wild with fanciful ideas” that is most resonant. Perhaps Humphries’ “fanciful ideas” include a belief that the majority of people will understand the complexity of his satirical targeting, rather than take it as a face value statement of what he thinks.
Which brings us back to the Spectator interview and the reactions it provoked, such as this tweet from podcaster Thomas John Jaspers:
.@Barry_Humphries You are my idol. You broke ground, you broke rules, you pissed off the establishment. You defined Australian culture. You have a lifetime of achievements. And now this is will be your legacy. You’ve become the people you used to make fun of.
Shut up and retire.— Thomas John Jaspers (@thomasjohn86) July 21, 2018
And this from Hannah Gadsby:
Barry Humphries loves those who hold power, hates vulnerable minorities and has completely lost the ability to read the room. Thats not a comedian, thats an irrelevant, inhumane dick biscuit of the highest order.
— Hannah Gadsby (@Hannahgadsby) July 22, 2018
Plus this article on the Daily Review from Luke Buckmaster:
At his best, Barry Humphries is a mesmerising, volcanic comedian who somehow finds a way to tinker on the edge of charm and grotesquery. It is not a question of whether, as the comedian moves into his mid 80’s, he is becoming (or has become) one of the extravagantly feral creations to which his legacy is tied. It is the question of whether there was any difference between him and them in the first place.
And this sketch on The Feed from Jenna Owen and Victoria Zerbst (you remember them from Aaron Chen Tonight):
The common themes? Barry’s wrong, out-of-touch, should shut up, and retire.
And fair enough too, there’s no humour to be found in dismissing the fact that according to a survey transphobia causes large numbers of trans people to self-harm. Or in claiming that transgenderism is “a fashion” when it’s been recorded since ancient times. Or by angsting about unisex toilets when they have a lot of advantages and have been very common in public settings for ages (see Wikipedia for a history of that). Or in blowing-off about “crazy teachers” preaching trans to kids. Perhaps Humphries hasn’t read the studies, such as this, which have suggested that there are lots of positive ways teachers can better support kids who identify as trans or gender diverse. Or perhaps, as Owen and Zerbst suggest, he’s from a generation that didn’t do empathy.
And if trans people want to have surgery, isn’t that their choice? And how does them having surgery harm Humphries or anyone else? Isn’t what harms people – of all identities – the way in which, say, Donald Trump is “stirring up politics”? Something Humphries seems to be in favour of as it will provide him with a bunch of material for a new Les Patterson show. And as funny as Sir Les can be, wouldn’t it be better for the world if Trump was just, you know, a President who wasn’t stirring shit up? It’d be worth sacrificing Humphries’ entire career to get rid of Trump, for sure.
The difficulty with this, though, is that despite Humphries’ recently-expressed views, it’s still possible to watch and enjoy his comedy. No one’s satirised the mindset of the Australian suburbs quite as well as Barry Humphries as Dame Edna or Sandy Stone. And few Australian comedians have demolished the self-serving awfulness of our politicians and leaders quite as well as Barry Humphries as Sir Les Patterson or union leader Lance Boyle.
Go back and watch footage of Humphries’ monologues from the 70s and 80s, or his classic TV shows like An Audience with Dame Edna and The Dame Edna Experience and tell us he’s a crap comedian.
On the other hand, those suggesting he “retire” and has “lost the room” also have a point. Remember Dame Edna’s confusing, bizarre and target-missing appearance on The Project a couple of years ago? The one where Edna was (we think) trying to make a joke about Waleed Aly being a rare example of a non-white person on Australian TV and came across like she was having a go:
At the start of the interview, Edna calls Aly “Little Wally”. Not especially hilarious, although it may come across as bit patronising to Aly if you aren’t aware that Edna’s been getting laughs out of shortening famous peoples’ names since the 1980s.
This was followed by her addressing the studio audience (another Edna trope is to ignore the interviewers and speak directly to the audience), saying “And I have to tell the viewers, that he really does look like this. He does! It’s not a trick of the lights!”. Clearly wondering whether this was an attack on his ethnicity, Aly responded: “I’m just trying to figure out what response you are looking for here.” It was a bit of a weird moment, but largely because Aly didn’t get that it was a reference (a rather oblique one, admittedly) to Aly’s recent Logies nomination, and the media’s reaction to that.
It’s the kind of misfire that Humphries rarely made when he was at the height of his Edna fame several decades ago but is becoming an increasingly common occurrence, especially when he’s improvising (which in TV interviews like that he always is).
The reason for all this is partly age, he’s 84 and has been looking stiff and breathless in public appearance over the past decade. In fact here’s a review of Barry Humphries Weimar Cabaret at the Barbican which suggests that he can’t even remember his lines anymore:
The saddest thing about this production is not the stories of these men who left their homes because of a tyrannical dictator (as Humphries points out with a wink that there are no psychopathic leaders anymore) but Humphries relying on autocue in his 85th year. He’s lost none of the charm and timing that has seen him at the forefront of comedy for the last 50+ years but it is upsetting to see a man who could improvise with the best of them relying on a script.
But it’s also down to a failure of Humphries to engage with current thinking on a variety of issues, such as trans rights and gender fluidity. Instead, Humphries seems happy to stick with the idea that anything that’s mainstream – as pro-trans views have in recent years – is wrong and should be attacked. Which was fair enough when the mainstream was the stifling attitudes prevalent in the Menzies era but is indefensible now when you’re saying that people who aren’t cisgendered are “ratbags” and worse.
It’s not like Humphries is incapable of understanding the issues trans people face, he’s an intelligent person who reads widely and thinks about current issues, so how can he hold such hateful and ridiculous views on trans people?
So, as much as we’ve enjoyed his work over the years, we think it’s time for Humphries’ to take his final bow. And shutting up about issues he can’t be bothered to understand would be a good idea too.
What’s Next For Nanette?
So Nanette‘s a world-wide success, earning rave reviews and gushing think-pieces everywhere you look for weeks online – which is basically decades by old media timescales – while giving Hannah Gadsby the kind of life-altering fame most performers could only dream of. Did anyone really think she was still going to quit?
The thing is with quitting shows – or as they’re more commonly known, farewell tours – is that usually you can only do them once. You’re making a promise to your fans: you should come see this show, because it’s going to be special. And clearly Gadsby delivered on that promise – so much so that nobody with half a brain is surprised she’s now not giving up on comedy at all.
“I said I was quitting, and then if I quit, I’m an idiot, now,” Gadsby responded. “Like, if the show had gone as badly as I’d planned, it would have worked. But now I’m left with a choice: I’ll either be an idiot or a hypocrite. I’ll be a hypocrite.”
And fair enough too.
That said, Nanette was basically a win-win situation for a performer with nothing left to lose. If it sank without trace, so what? She had a decent back-up career going doing arts programming – including a show for the ABC and a Edinburgh live show she’s since cancelled:
Last year Gadsby won every major live comedy award. How do you follow that? You quit. Get serious. Write an art lecture about that massive blind spot in the male gaze. And make it hilarious. This year Gadsby wants to show you how to value what cannot be measured, how to look at art through closed eyes and why we must use our imagination to find all those women who’ve been buried deeper than history is prepared to dig. This year Gadsby’s not joking, and she is so much funnier for it.
And really, Gadsby had enough name recognition that Nanette was probably never going to “flop”. She’s a reasonably well known and well-considered comedian doing an attention-grabbing stand up show about how she’s quitting stand-up; it was a reasonable bet that it wouldn’t be in the bottom 70% of shows on the Australian festival circuit. She was rejecting comedy, comedy hadn’t rejected her.
The real problem is that Gadsby is now famous the English-speaking world over for the kind of act she can’t do again. She can do a personal show; she can do a show that’s not about being funny; she can do a show about sexism and art; she can probably do a show that combines them all. But she can’t do another Nanette, and Nanette is what’s made her famous.
Nanette works because it has a surprise twist. Nanette works because it’s a show by someone telling you what she really thinks on her way out the door. Nanette has an anger and an energy to it that comes from a performer with nothing to lose. It’s a one-time only deal, and that’s before we get into how it was largely the right show at the right time that tapped into a very particular point in the zeitgeist. Gadsby is a good comedian, but if the big social issue of 2020 is lethal heat waves or the return of Stalinism she’s probably not going to be doing Nanette II: It’s Getting Hot in Here.
So here’s the paradox: Hannah Gadsby is coming back to comedy on the back of a success she almost certainly can’t repeat. That’s not a slur on her abilities – Nanette is the kind of success nobody could do twice, because its success is life-changing. Even if you disagree that Nanette was a one-off, clearly she can’t do Nanette again because she’s no longer the person who came up with Nanette.
We’re not saying that her next stand-up show is going to be her talking about her new-found fame… but you know, that’s usually what happens in these situations and it’s all downhill from there. You can’t break though twice, and once you’ve broken through it’s hard to persuade regular people you’re just like they are. Of course she can be outspoken on issues; of course she can do a show looking back on her life before she became famous. But she’s still a famous success doing those things, and the changes everything.
(plus Nanette was in part raging against comedy itself for not letting her tell her story; that’s not really an approach she can try again after this kind of success)
The other option is to try and sustain this moment. She’s already got a book coming out, Ten Steps to Nanette – though exactly when seems to be up in the air, as it was due out a month ago and she’s obviously been a bit busy. You’d have to think the offers from major networks to do something – anything – would be flooding in, and Gadsby’s already done a bit of acting in Please Like Me; is the world ready for Nanette: The Sitcom?
On the personal side of things, she’s spoken out a number of times about how draining performing Nanette is for her; professionally, her decision to stick with comedy (or a form of comedy at least) means taking some time to figure out what’s next makes a lot of sense too. But reportedly Netflix deals are a one-time payment thing: while Gadsby is no doubt making extra cash from the extra live performances of Nanette, she’s not making any more money off her special now that it’s a massive hit.
If she wants to take full advantage of the wave she’s riding, she may have to ride it a little while longer yet.
Pointless without the laughs
The British game show Pointless has been a cult afternoon hit on the ABC for a few years now, delighting retirees and people taking sickies alike with its mix of obscure trivia questions and twee comedy banter. It’s the kind of show we don’t make much of here. We Australians make game shows (featuring ordinary people answering quiz questions for prize money) and panel shows (featuring comedians trying to make us laugh for an appearance fee), and, Have You Been Paying Attention? aside, never the Twain shall meet…until Ten bought the rights to make a local version of Pointless.
Mark Humphries wouldn’t have been our first choice to become this country’s Alexander Armstrong, or anything really, but at least it stops him making more terrible satire. Also, it’s nice to feel like you’ve got a shot at answering most of the questions; all those UK-centric rounds in British Pointless, of the likes of “Chancellors of the Exchequers of the 1990s”* or “Leicester City captains 1970-2015″**, are a bit hard-going if you’re from Adelaide. Whereas Aussie Actresses? That’s more our style. Although, annoyingly, we never found out whether last night’s contestants would have got a pointless answer if they’d gone with our answer of Naomi Watts in Funny Games…because they’ve cut all that out.
Yep, one of things quiz nuts really like about Pointless, the bit where Richard Osman, or Dr Andrew Rochford in this case, runs through what all the different possible answers would have scored, isn’t part of the show – there’s no time. This is a 45-minute quiz show in a 30-minute slot, so it’s bye bye that long list of answers, and bye bye lots of other things too, like one of the teams, and one of the rounds, and some of the questions.
But this is possibly a good thing. Pointless Downunder, as absolutely no one is calling it, is fast and question-focused. There’s no pfaffing around talking to contestant Dave about that hilarious thing that happened when he was working for the NHS, it’s: question, answer, question, answer, ad break, more questions and answers. It’s a format that better suits the timeslot of 6:00pm on a commercial network. And as TV Tonight pointed out the other day:
TEN is banking that most viewers won’t have seen [the British] version
Time will tell whether this will rate as well as Grant Denyer’s Family Feud in that timeslot, but there’s a strategy to get it seen by the viewers that seems to be paying off. Or it’s all going to go tits-up really soon. One of them.
What do we think? We like the fast pace but miss the comedy. Admittedly, after two episodes, Humphries and Rochford haven’t yet had time to build up that back catalogue of in-jokes about the Central African Republic that Armstrong and Osman have, and based on what we’ve seen of them so far, it’s Rochford who’s the funniest of the pair, but who knows? When the main problem the show faces is not getting axed or re-worked with Grant Denyer as host, they’re not concerned about making us laugh. Piss off and watch the British version on iView if you want that.
* Gordon Brown?
** No idea.
Drop the Pilot
Okay, so we were too busy being distracted by Greg Fleet’s latest twitter ruckus to see this coming:
CHANNEL 10 is turning to people power with a Pilot Week of eight new programs set to screen from August 19.
The revolutionary event, to be hosted by Grant Denyer and Angela Bishop, will give Aussie television viewers their biggest say ever in the shows they want to see on air.
And who could resist these winners?
Look at all that comedy! Cheap, shoddy, disposable comedy! Kind of strange there’s no drama pilots being aired in pilot week but hey, guess drama is something Ten still takes semi-seriously. And let’s be honest: at least half of these pilots are one-off ideas either thrown out there to get some buzz or just making up the numbers. “Dave O’Neill’s half hour comedy Dave“? How is that even a real show?
(sure, O’Neill has been a comedy trooper for decades now, but what’s he been publicly attached to that’s been even remotely a hit since he was the one who didn’t become a nationally famous millionaire out of Hughsy, Kate and Dave?)
And it’s a good thing this is almost certainly just a PR stunt rather than a serious attempt to try and widen their program base, because just look at that line-up: half the time if you’re not a worn-out retread then you’re someone flailing around the shallow end and if you’re neither there’s a good chance you’ve leap-frogged ahead of around a hundred vastly more qualified people to get your head on air. Who the hell wants to see Sam Dastyari anywhere ever again?
Also: where’s the women? It’s 2018 – if you’re airing eight pilots and they’re all fronted by men, you’ve made a conscious decision to exclude women. And it’s clearly not on that old chestnut of “we couldn’t find any good enough”, because going by what’s being served up a sock puppet would be over qualified for some of these jobs.
If any of these ideas were really that good, Ten would have given them the green light without making them jump through these attention-seeking hoops. Because that’s all this kind of “event” is – a stunt that has bugger-all to do with deciding which shows make it to air. Remember the ABC’s 2016 Comedy Showroom? The Herald Sun did:
The only other comparable event is ABC’s anthology series Comedy Showroom in 2016, trialling six pilots including The Letdown and Ronny Chieng: International Student.
Remember how success there was based on audience votes? Like fuck it was: Both The Letdown and Ronny Chieng: International Student made it to series because overseas networks stumped up cash to make them, not because of some local online poll. So forget about getting your “biggest say ever”: if the votes go the way of what the programmers want to air, it’ll be hailed as a win for people power, and if the audience somehow votes for that Heath Franklin show the ballots’ll get lost in a warehouse fire by November.
Sure, we’ll be watching them, because we’re idiots who like Australian comedy. The Drunk History knock-off might work, though it’s probably going to just be a Hamish & Andy’s True Story knock off (because that’s kinda just Drunk History without the booze). But the rest? Even if they’re great shows, there’s absolutely nothing about them – apart from maybe nostalgia – to make people tune in (since when have viewers wanted “nothing but feel good moments”?). Which is why they’re being aired as part of “Pilot Week”: without a gimmick they’d sink without trace.
Which doesn’t really suggest they’ve got a future once the gimmick’s over.